Tema: Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work

How is possible that still are some who are sympathetic to the Fidel Castro? Don’t let this psychopath liar fool you, he has no conscience.
Castro during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 12, 1962, the closest the world had ever come to nuclear war, wrote in his cable to Khrushchev in October 26, 1962, “that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through tan act of clear legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other… the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.”

Khrushchev response in October 30, 1962, “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. You, of course, realize where that would have led. Rather than a simple strike, it would have been the start of a thermonuclear world war.”

Castro, in his deep hatred against the United States, did not hesitate in asking for the launch of a nuclear strike without given a damn that such action sealed the annihilation of the Cuban people and a large part of humanity. Castro deserves everything that's coming to him.

Cuba in 1958, with a population of 6.6 million inhabitants had 6.3 million head of cattle. In 2009, according to data by Cuba’s National Statistics Office (ONE), with a population of 11.3 million, the number of cattle had been reduced to 3.89 million heads. These figures don’t need explanation, they speak for themselves.

Weekend at Fidel's
Jeffrey Goldberg is not the first American journalist to cuddle up to Castro.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499604575512352291352646.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Mary Anastasia O'Grady
September 27, 2010

At most marine parks in the world the animals provide the entertainment. But at the Havana aquarium last month, Fidel Castro had a couple of humans eating out of his hand and clapping like trained seals.

I refer here to the Atlantic Monthly's Jeffrey Goldberg, who traveled recently to Cuba at Castro's invitation with his friend Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Goldberg has posted a two-part report from his lengthy conversations with the dictator online for the magazine. One part includes details of a day at the aquarium, where Mr. Goldberg, accompanied by Ms. Sweig, seems to have experienced more than one "thrill going up [his] leg" in the presence of Fidel.

The reporter "hope[s] to be publishing a more comprehensive article about the subject in a forthcoming print edition of the Atlantic." I'm guessing that anyone who actually knows something about Castro's Cuba is not the target audience.

Castro again has an urgent need to put a smiley face on his dictatorship. The economy is in dire straits. Food is scarce, electricity is a rarity, and soap and toilet paper are luxuries. Cuba produces almost nothing and this makes it difficult to get hard currency—aka real money—which in turn makes it tough to buy from abroad. Lending sources have dried up.

If the regime is to stay in power, it needs a new source of income to pay the secret police and keep the masses in rice. The best bet is the American tourist, last seen circa 1950 exploiting the locals, according to revolutionary lore, but now needed by the regime. It wants the U.S. travel ban lifted. To prevail, Castro needs to counteract rumors that he is a dictator. Solution: a makeover in the Atlantic. In Mr. Goldberg, he no doubt recognized the perfect candidate for the job.

Fidel's step one was to tell Mr. Goldberg that he is outraged by anti-Semitism. "I don't think that anyone has been slandered more than the Jews," the old man proclaims to his guests. And by the way, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should "stop picking on the Jews." When Mr. Goldberg asks whether Castro will tell the Iranian himself, Castro says, "I am saying this so you can communicate it." Translation: This should be the headline of your piece so that the American people will recognize my benevolence. Mr. Goldberg complied.

We are supposed to conclude that Cuba is no longer a threat to global stability and that Fidel is a reformed tyrant. But how believable is a guy whose revolution all but wiped out Cuba's tiny Jewish community of 15,000, and who spent the past 50 years supporting the terrorism of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Syria, Libya and Iran? And how does Castro explain Venezuela, where Cuban intelligence agents run things, Iran is an ally and anti-Semitism has been state policy in recent years? Mr. Goldberg doesn't go there with Fidel.

It also is passing strange that we hear nothing from Mr. Goldberg about poor Alan Gross. Mr. Gross, a U.S. government contractor and a Jew, has been languishing in a Cuban prison since December. His crime: distributing computers to a handful of Cuban Jews who want to establish contact with the diaspora. Is that any way to show love for the Jewish people?

It never seems to cross Mr. Goldberg's mind that he is being used in a manner Communists first learned at Lenin's knee. Or perhaps he is happy to be useful. In a follow-up post he explains that since Fidel is not as bad as Pol Pot, Cubans should stop complaining. And to demonstrate further how little he knows about the plight of the Cuban people, he says that the "release" of political prisoners "is currently being negotiated." Wrong. Some have been exiled; some others may receive conditional parole meaning that they can be returned to prison at any time if the regime disapproves of their activities.

Mr. Goldberg is peddling his Castro interviews as serious journalism. But while he was "curious" to get a "glimpse of the great man," he was ill-prepared for the job. Presumably he knew this, which is why he allowed Ms. Sweig to lead him around Havana by the nose.

This set him up for failure because Ms. Sweig—an academic with easy access to the island while critics are banned—is a trusted friend of the dictatorship. "Fidel greeted Julia warmly; they have known each other for more than twenty years," Mr. Goldberg reports.

When Castro declares that the Cuban model no longer works, Mr. Goldberg turns to Ms. Sweig, as if there is something profound to be grasped. He is not saying "the ideas of the Revolution" have failed, she explains, but only that the state "has much too big a role" in the economy. Right, except that the state-owned economy is the idea of the revolution.

It is hardly surprising, then, that what we get from this interview is warmed-over Barbara Walters, another whose heart went pitter patter when she got close to the Cuban despot. This encounter also produced nothing of substance.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com

After Jeffrey Goldberg published his interview with Fidel Castro the best reaction he could get from those who have detail information about Cuba is a laugh. His flattering of this brutal tyrant making him looks like a lovely old man upset even the non-so easily offended.

Mary O'Grady is not one of those fools that are carried away by warm confessions. The reason is that she is very perceptive and well informed about Cuba. While others are allured by the siren call of a brutal dictator, she will call him on it and embarrass him.

Fidel Castro supported with propaganda, money, weapons and Cuban soldiers those who opposed the State of Israel. He is a megalomaniac obsessed with grandiose actions and power, who want to be taken seriously by the world.

To the progressive Jews who support Fidel Castro, their “new” friend, I ask how they feel about his anti-Semitic statement in his June 2010 “reflections":

The hatred felt by the state of Israel against the Palestinians is such that they would not hesitate to send the 1 ½ million men, women and children of that country to the crematoria where millions of Jews of all ages were exterminated by the Nazis” Castro said. “It would seem that the Fuehrer's swastika is today Israel's banner, he said, referencing Adolf Hitler

You know, maybe I sound like a broken record, but if Goldberg were not a Jew but some Spanish Socialist, or some French intellectual like Sartre, or some Canadian Trudeau type, let alone some "Latin" Che lover, I would both understand his Fidel thing better and feel less offended. A Jew really should know better and act accordingly. I mean, anything even remotely close to shilling for Castro, Inc. is profoundly disreputable, for anybody, but for a Jew it's also demeaning (which it would not be for, say, Santana, who never had an exalted position to fall from, but rather the opposite). Goldberg, as a Jew, should be above this sort of disgraceful self-soiling. Again, it's not that he owes Cuba, but that he owes himself and his own people.

Cuba’s economy is in very bad shape. Food is scare, electrical blackouts continuous, soap and deodorants are hard to obtain, and even toilet is a luxury. Under the Castroit regimen the production of good are very limited, making difficult to obtain hard currency trough trade in order to by products from abroad. Basically subsidies from Venezuela and a few other countries like China, keeps the regime in power.

Castros’ tyranny continuous to starve the people, but the mainstream media still fine good things to say about it. It is amazing how many prominent American Liberals continuous to defend the Castroit regime and give credence to its ideology.

Maybe Mr. Goldberg doesn’t know that those who survived the Moncada attack on July 26, 1953 were given prison terms that, compared to those given by the Castros regime judiciary, may have induced them to commit further acts of rebellion. It is difficult to reach a different conclusion when one compares Fidel Castro’s fifteen-year sentence for organizing the Moncada attack with those of peaceful dissenters tried in 2003. No one fired a weapon against anyone, none kidnapped or killed an individual, but they were found guilty of crimes against the regime and handed down sentences that fluctuate between twelve and twenty-eight years in prison.

Overwhelmed documentary evidence, especially photographs, prove that the survivors of the Moncada attack experienced much more humane prison conditions than those endured by anti-Communist prisoners in years to come.

Notwithstanding the gravity of the insurrectional action, Batista granted amnesty to Fidel Castro and his followers after merely twenty-two months in prison. Aside from proving a willingness to forgive and forget that honors Batista, such pardons stands in stark contrast with the absence of comparable benevolence under Communism. Scores of anti-Communist rebels that took up arms against Castro were captured and executed by firing squad.

Fidel Castro, pardoned twenty-two months after organizing and leading an assault that cost over eighty lives, has penalized his peaceful adversaries with such severity that constitutes the greatest travesty in Cuban history.

In the majority of Eastern European countries the Communist dictators died of natural causes after they lost power due to the fall of the Berlin wall. The fact that they weren’t tried and executed for the millions of people they killed, leave a bad taste in the mouth. It is really a slap on the face that they died in their beds. Hopefully Fidel Castro will live long enough to be executed like Mussolini, Ceausescu, Gadhafi, et al.

People laughs as the Goldbergs & Oliver Stones of this world trying to spin their rhetoric for despots and dictators around the world. Do they really think we are stupid enough to think an old dog can learn new tricks. Their drivel is so predictable, they want the US to please allow tourism so we can fund their agenda. People will gladly spend their money and help the Castroit regime join the world, until then suffer as you have made your people suffer. Maybe an uprising of the people will change what need to be change.

The Left's infatuation with Castro has been going on for decades. Never get so close to evil that you can look into his eyes, since is very easy to cast a spell at that distance. Of course there are monsters who can charm, but that doesn't explain why the charm doesn't wear off once you're back home, and the spell is replaced by the reality of the impoverishment and hopelessness that the Castroit regime has brought to the Cuban people for 53 years.

The left depicts itself as champion of freedom and defender of the oppressed. Yet, for reasons that seem contrary to what common sense would suggest, the left seems to have developed a fondness for cruel and oppressive dictatorships like that of the Castro brothers.

Seems that this apparent contradiction can be explained by the fact that many on the left have a visceral distain for their own country. Over the last thirty years or so the left has fought a culture war against the very country that nurtured freedom and fought for the oppressed, the United States.

The Cuban people won't experience real freedom until they are freed from the Castros tyrannical regime. People like Jeffrey Goldberg, as apologists for the Castros, are severe impediments.

Castrism in Cuba has not only failed, it has destroyed the lives of millions. It set back for over one hundred years a promising country, once considered to be the jewel of the Caribbean. Now Cuba is just a decaying remnant and a constant reminder of the total failure of the Castroit regime. And Castro is just finding out that it isn't working, and Goldberg is in awe?

Iniciado por Tamakun

Over the last thirty years or so the left has fought a culture war against the very country that nurtured freedom and fought for the oppressed, the United States.

I don't support the left in the US, in fact I'm totally against it. But they are right when they say that the government of the US has never fought for freedom or the oppressed but for their own interest. If the US hadn't stolen Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philipines from Spain (they didn't intend to free anybody) the Cuban communist revolution would have never taken place, because the USA (an alien nation for Cubans, unlike Spain) were taking Cuban resources away from the Cuban people.

Questions, but no answers yet
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/22/1885561/questions-but-no-answers-yet.html#ixzz135Ez355A

BY PAUL WEBSTER HARE

paulhare@bu.edu

Posted on Friday, 10.22.10

Cubans are hearing about big changes in their country but not from their leaders -- the revolution has gone silent. Why is Raúl Castro not explaining the changes? Why is Fidel Castro not talking about Cuba at all?

Here are 10 major issues that Cubans are learning about through statements of trade unions and in the government media -- and the questions that go unanswered.

1. Cuban workers have been told that a million of them -- the same number as the entire Cuban Communist Party -- are surplus to requirements. They can now run licensed private businesses in 178 activities, employ nonfamily members and earn profits if they pay taxes. Fidel Castro's eldest son, touring Japan this month, is saying Cubans should learn from Japanese entrepreneurs.

Q1. What will be the limits of the Cuban public sector where more than 80 percent will still work? Will these licenses be revoked in the future, as has happened in the past? Will the businesses be able to finance their equipment and their vehicles? What buildings will they use?

2. Cuba hopes to discover new oil reserves offshore. The government says there is vast potential for Cuba.

Q2. What is the plan for using these resources? Will Cuban private businesses be able to win business in the oil sector?

3. Foreigners are now allowed to buy and sell property in Cuba. Leases of up to 99 years have been authorized. Foreigners will play golf on new courses to enjoy along with their condos.

Q3. When will Cubans be given the same rights to invest as foreigners? And will Cubans be able to benefit from the market value of their homes?

4. The Cuban revolution is releasing and sending into exile dozens of political prisoners. The government has long claimed they were justly convicted for crimes against the state.

Q4. Is exile now the only route for Cubans with different opinions? What will happen to discussion within Cuba on ideas about political and economic openness -- the new entrepreneurs? Will the jails be the ultimate deterrent again, when even Raúl Castro now favors some of the economic ideas of the opposition?

5. The Cuban government continues to pay the millions who work for the state in one currency -- the old peso -- but many products are only available in CUCs (Cuban currency tied to the U.S. dollar).

Q5. How will Cubans survive long term, when an average salary is worth 15 CUCs a month and a bottle of cooking oil is only available at 3 CUCs?

6. Raúl Castro is not antagonizing the United Sates, saying little at all. Meanwhile, Fidel Castro is calling President Obama ``the little gentleman who's there in the presidency'' and thinks former President Harry Truman ``must be in some place in hell.''

Q6. What is the Castros' policy toward the United States, where more that one million Cubans live and which is one of its major food suppliers?

7. After 51 years of revolution, with their leaders all well over 70 years old, Cubans see their country is dependent on Venezuela with more than $5 billion of annual subsidies. Yet in the September 2010 elections, the opposition to President Hugo Chávez won a majority of votes.

Q7. What is Plan B if Chávez loses power in 2012? Will Cubans suffer again, just like after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

8. The Castros welcome political contacts with China. But they say nothing about the implications of following China's economic policies.

Q8. Is Cuba still communist? Does Raúl Castro believe now that ``to get rich is glorious''? Does he believe, like the Chinese, that prosperity for all is the aim of government? And if the cat catches the mouse, who cares about its color?

9. The Cuban national institute of statistics reports that less than 3 percent of Cubans access the Internet.

Q9. Is there really a bandwidth-technology issue, or is the government determined to hide something?

10. The president of Cuba is not explaining the country's future to the people. Cuba's youth are apathetic. Raúl Castro did not even speak at the sacred Moncada festival on July 26.

Q10. What plans does Raúl Castro have for the future of Cuba?

Paul Webster Hare, a former British ambassador to Cuba, teaches at Boston University.

Former British Ambassador to Cuba Paul Webster Hare has 10 very valid and poignant questions about the island prison. One would expect the "Cuba Experts" to jump at the chance to show their expertness in all things Cubans, but don't hold your breath.

Cuba: A centralized failure
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_705855.html

By Ralph R. Reiland
Monday, October 25, 2010
Here's a short multiple-choice quiz.

Who said the following? "Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread."

A) Fidel Castro, warning Cubans to resist the power of their capitalist neighbor.

B) Thomas Jefferson, warning about the inherent inefficiencies of centralized power.

It was Jefferson.

He also said, "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave men otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government."

Castro, of course, went in the other direction, putting every pursuit of industry and improvement under his thumb, and the Cuban people ended up wanting not only bread but also fish, meat, cars, air conditioning, clothing and housing.

In its December 2008 report, "The Cuban revolution at 50: Heroic myth and prosaic failure," The Economist magazine described the conditions in Cuba the year before Castro shot his way to power.

"In 1958, Cuba was among the five most developed countries in Latin America: Life expectancy was close to that in the United States, and there were more doctors per head than in Britain or France," reported The Economist. "Havana boasted 135 cinemas in 1958 — more than New York City. Today, only a score remain open, although the city's population has doubled."

And those few screens don't show what Big Brother doesn't want the serfs to see.

The Economist summed up the economic and political results of Castro's success in driving more than a million of his country's more entrepreneurial people to escape to the United States:

"Mr. Castro's Cuba is a sad place. Although the population is now mainly black or mulatto, its rulers form a mainly white gerontocracy. The failure of collective farming means that it imports up to 80 percent of its food. The health and education systems struggle to maintain standards. Inequalities have risen."

Additionally, there are special jail cells for "prisoners of conscience," for those who insufficiently cheered the regime. It's not wise to talk about the scarcity of freedom or the lack of eggs.

NPR, summing up five decades of Castro keeping a lid on individualism and capitalism, reported that government stores in Cuba "regularly run out of meat, eggs and cooking oil." Those shortages in supply exist even with the government keeping demand artificially low through ration books that limit the amount of consumption per capita.

The government-dictated allotments for coffee and vegetable oil, respectively, ran around four ounces and two cups — per month, per capita. The fish allotment? Ten ounces per month per person in a nation surrounded by some of the world's best fishing waters.

One thing worked in Cuba — Castro's campaign of misinformation. "Castro's lasting success has been as a masterful propagandist," stated The Economist. "He has exploited the cult of Che in particular. Guevara's myth — of the romantic rebel, not the murderous, militaristic Marxist of real life."

The romantic version of Guevara shows up regularly on the T-shirts of political science majors, those who are big on hope and change and clueless about economics.

Some enterprising entrepreneur should update the T-shirts: The shirt could feature both Fidel and Che, looking admiringly at each other, 1959, and underneath could be this old Texan put-down about those who can't deliver — "All hat, no cattle."

A very cleaver turn of words with regard to the responsibility of Fidel Castro for the ruin of Cuba. Ralph R. Reiland, associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University, used the old Texas put-down meaning that Castro is all talk and no substance who cannot back up his words.

Fidel's experiment with Marxist-Leninist political economy has been a total failure. Cuba was one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America before 1959. Under the Castroism the island economy has been ruined beyond recognition, transforming it into a third world country.

Cuba sugar production was 1.1 million tons in 2009, theworst harvest in 116 years. In the decade of the 1950s Cuba exported an average of 5.0 million tons a year, supplying 35% of the world's export market. Who would have imagined that the world's largest exporter of sugar would have to resort to external supplies to meet its needs?

The regime currently imports about 84% of the food stuffs. Who would have imagined that Cuba would become an importer of food from the United States of all places?

Cuba is the country where their inhabitants can only buy in the gigantic company store, where the Castros move the fences of the farms at their convenience, set prices as they please, and pay to the worker-servants, in complicity with the official trade union, with simple vouchers (also known as Cuban pesos) that have no value anywhere else. A country where they offer the natural resources or the golf courses to the highest bidder, stipulating that buyers can’t be Cubans’ who manage to escaped from the plantation and demonstrated, with their results all over the world, that happiness and prosperity are possible without having to depend on megalomaniac consumed by his own ego or an ideology that no longer fool anybody.